Thursday, December 28, 2017

Chess
tournaments, for better or worse, don't usually command international
headlines. Do you remember those matches in
2013 ~ it was the World Chess
Championship between reigning world champion Viswanathan Anand and challenger
Magnus Carlsen, to determine the 2013 World Chess Champion, held from 9 to 22
Nov 2013 in Chennai, India, under the auspices of FIDE (the World Chess
Federation). Carlsen won the match 6½–3½
after ten of the twelve scheduled games, becoming the new world chess champion.

The 2017 King
Salman FIDE World Rapid Championship is a 15-round Swiss open taking place in
the Apex Convention Centre in the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh from 26-28
December. The prize fund is $750,000, with $250,000 for 1st place. The time
control is 15 minutes per player for all moves, with a 10-second increment from
move 1. The Championships in Riyadh,
Saudi Arabia, has become the focus of debates this week on Israeli-Saudi
relations and women's rights in the country. On Saturday, one of the best
women's chess players in the world, Anna Muzychuk of Ukraine, said she and her
sister would skip the tournament as a protest of the country's treatment of
women as "secondary creature(s)."
Separately, Israeli officials criticized Saudi Arabia and the World
Chess Federation, known as FIDE, on Tuesday after seven Israeli competitors
were not granted visas to attend the tournament.

Saudi Arabia and
FIDE agreed to loosen the dress code for the event and allow women to wear
high-necked white blouses rather than a hijab or abaya, a loose-fitting robe
worn by some Muslim women. That dress code was a first for any sporting event
in Saudi Arabia, the organization said. FIDE also said that it had made
"ground-breaking special arrangements" to issue visas to chess
players from Iran and Qatar, two countries at odds with Saudi Arabia
politically. The statement did not mention Israel, however.

Ukraine's
grandmaster Anna Muzychuk won two gold
medals in the FIDE World Chess Rapid & Blitz Championships 2016, in the
Qatari capital Doha. The World Blitz
Chess Championship is a tournament held to determine the world champion in
chess played under blitz time controls. Since 2012, FIDE has held an annual
joint rapid and blitz chess tournament and billed it as the World Rapid &
Blitz Chess Championships. The current world blitz champion is Russian
grandmaster Sergey Karjakin. Time
controls for each player in a game of blitz chess are, according to FIDE, 10
minutes or less per player

The happy news is
that Indian Grandmaster Viswanathan Anand stunned World No 1 Magnus Carlsen in
the ongoing World Rapid and Blitz Championship yesterday.
Anand and Carlsen met in round
nine of the championship with the Indian on an unbeaten run. Starting with
black pieces, Anand began with an aggressive approach. Carlsen was caught
off-guard with his approach and faltered to give Anand the advantage.

The Indian finished
off the match in 34 moves to remain unbeaten in the tournament after nine
games. Anand has drawn four games and won five. Before facing Carlsen, Anand
drew his match against Russia’s Vladmir Fedoseev.